a-the-ol-o-gy /A-THēˈäləjē/Noun:
1) The branch of onticology devoted to the study
of immanence.2) The diagnosis and critique of illusions of transcendence
in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and politics.
A-theology is not a belief. It is not the belief that God, gods, and the supernatural do not exist; though it does lead to the conclusion that within the order of being or immanence, there is no God, gods, immaterial forms, or supernatural causation. Rather, a-theology is the science of immanence and the diagnosis and critique of all illusions of transcendence.
As the science of immanence a-theology comprehends being in terms of flat ontology. It seeks to investigate the nature of immanence, how it is organized, and what takes place within immanence. Flat ontology is not the thesis that all beings are equal for certainly some beings enjoy greater power and a broader scope of effects than other beings. Rather, flat ontology is the thesis that there are no beings that 1) stand above and outside of beings such that they condition other beings without themselves being conditioned in any way (transcendence and unilateral causality), and 2) that are there are no beings that are the source and origin of all other beings. Rather, all beings exist on a single plan, the plane of immanence, together.
read on!
As Whitehead observes, the plane of immanence defended by flat ontology is a disjunctive diversity of multiplicities or what onticology calls objects or systems. In formal logic, an inclusive disjunction (P v Q) is true so long as one or both of the atomic propositions (P, Q) that compose it are true. Consequently, if P and Q both exist then the disjunction P v Q will be true. Likewise if P exists and Q does not exist the disjunction P v Q will be true, and if P does not exist and Q does exist, the disjunction P v Q will be true. The only instance where P v Q will be false is where there P and Q both do not exist.
As a disjunctive diversity being allows the independence of the entities or multiplicities that make up the relation. In other words, P can exist without Q, Q can exist without P, and where P and Q do enter into a relation with one another the terms nonetheless remain independent entities in their own right. A disjunctive ontology thus maintains both the singularity and the independence of the beings that populate being in immanence. Put differently, the relations between entities in disjunctive diversity are external. When two multiplicities form an assemblage or enter into an external relation with one another the being of each part remains and a new object or system is sometimes produced. As Whitehead remarks in Process and Reality, the many is increased by one. By this Whitehead observes that the many or disjunctive diversity remains and that the external relation also introduces an additional being into being. The whole, which is an assemblage formed out of these parts, does not totalize the parts an absorb them into a fusional organism, but rather is a part alongside these other parts.
It is for this reason that there can be strife between the parts and the whole of which they are parts. Cells can revolt against the functional role they’ve been alloted in the body generating cancer, and the workers at a factor can go on strike. As a consequence, every object or system harbors entropy within it. And this entropy entails that objects or systems must perpetually labor to maintain their organization lest the relation forged among the parts return to a state of complete independence. However, entropy is not simply a negative dimension of objects or assemblages threatening their continued existence. Rather entropy is that minimal noise within every object or assemblage that allows assemblages to evolve and change becoming other than they now are. In responding to the striking workers the factory becomes something new and other than it was.
This is the opposite of the logic of conjunction found in holisms where all relations between terms are internal. In formal logic a conjunction is only true when both of the multiplicities or atomic propositions that make up the proposition are true. It is only when both P and Q exist that the proposition P & Q will be true. Such is the formula of holism where one claims that all entities are internally related. The claim that all beings are internally related is the claim that P cannot exist apart from Q and that Q cannot exist apart from P. Here being is thought as forming a conjunctive unity rather than a disjunctive diversity. Insofar as holism obeys a conjunctive logic of internal relations it is impossible to see how any change is possible within holistic being for all parts in such wholes are necessarily dependent upon one another and are therefore unable to reconfigure their relations. There is neither movement, change, nor novelty within a conjunctive whole for movement requires the severance and shifting of relations, while change requires that something that is unrelated be capable of influencing an assemblage. Holism thus leads to a frozen, block universe. Moreover, in a holistic universe the whole becomes transcendent to the parts, subordinating each and all of the parts to its functional place within the organism of the whole. As a consequence, there can be no strife between the whole and the parts because the parts are exhausted in beings parts of the whole and therefore introduce no entropy into the whole. Everything has its place and that’s it.
Nonetheless, if the beings that populate the disjunctive diversity of immanent being are multiplicities, then this is because substances, systems, or objects are never simple substances, but are always aggregates, assemblages, or crowds. Every object is already a crowd such that the man’s response to Jesus’s question when he said “I am legion for we are many” holds true of every object. As multiplicities, every object is both a unit and a crowd. Like Cezanne’s paintings where units or substances emerge out of scintillating varieties of light, objects emerge out of other objects. It is for this reason that objects differ in and from themselves for they differ from the objects of which they are composed. And it is for this reason that all objects are doomed to be constitutively incomplete for the objects of which an object is composed continue on their own adventures, tracing their own paths, pursuing their own aims, thereby upsetting the unity and completeness of every object. This constitutive incompleteness of objects is the principle of chaos within each object allowing for new local manifestations to take place.
Many of the beings that populate immanence perpetually fall prey to the illusions of transcendence. Transcendence consists in treating one terms among beings as eminent above all others and as an entity that conditions and originates all other beings without itself being conditioned in its turn. Although theistic conceptions of God are exemplary cases of the illusion of transcendence, they are not the only or even most common cases of this illusion. When we see the law and organization of the state as issuing from a sovereign we have fallen prey to an illusion of immanence. When we see production and labor as issuing from capital rather than capital being a product of labor and production, we have fallen prey to an illusion of transcendence. When we see law as the ground of social order rather than being a reflection of social order, we have fallen prey to an illusion of transcendence.
Everywhere transcendence inverts things, confusing causes and effects, and treating one term as the origin of all others. Wholes do not originate parts but rather arise out of parts, and terms do not stand above other terms, but are terms alongside these terms with no particularly privileged position. The negative task of a-theology thus consists in ferreting out these illusions and showing how the entities described (law, order, wholes, etc.) can be accounted for in terms of immanence and as second-order products of assemblages or objects attempting to navigate and regulate their own internal entropy. A-theology thus rejects all phallocentrism, logocentrism, and patriarchy in the domains of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and politics.
At the level of ethical and political thought the critique of transcendence becomes particularly important. Because transcendence is an illusion, societies or collectives do not issue from laws and transcendent identities. Rather, collectives or societies are multiplicities of multiplicities, multiples of multiples that only enjoy disjunctive unity. Any unity that a collective enjoys is a part alongside the other parts of which it is composed and the relations among these parts remain external to one another. Consequently, collectives cannot appeal to veiled essences such as “American”, “White”, “Jew”, “Christian”, “Hindu”, “Male”, etc., as a unifying principle embedded in each part, nor can law function as a glue that holds the parts together. The parts retain their independence even while entering into the assemblage of the collective. At best, tribal names are fictional operators that rhetorically strive to act on the parts convincing them that they share the essence of all the other parts. They are themselves operators and parts, rather than ultimate grounds. Consequently, every collective obeys a logic of Cantorian sets rather than Russelian types. There is no grounding and unifying essence among the parts that compose these sets in a collective, only a bricolage of singularities.
This entails that the continued existence of collectives is always problematics for singular multiplicities do not surrender or erase their singularity by virtue of entering a multiplicity, nor do they cease to be what they are. A work is required for the collective to continue. It is for this reason that the concept of pistis is particularly important within the framework of onticological ethics and politics. Like a-theology, pistis it not a belief. Pistis is not a belief in something that is impossible to prove, but rather is a work and a labor. It is the labor of an impossible community described by Jean-Luc Nancy in his meditations on the singular plural and the inoperative community, by Irigaray in her ethics of sexual difference, and by Lacan in the irreducible Twoness of the sexual relation. It is the work of an irreducible demos. Unable to appeal to any transcendent shared identity or essence that would glue the community together by virtue of all members sharing the same essence, unable to appeal to a shared law or set of customs that would link everyone together by the same practices, collectives forged in the full awareness of immanence have only the work of pistis which is the labor of relating the non-related and withdrawn while maintaining disjunctive diversity and refusing a reduction of the other to the same. Such a labor is borne of a love of difference rather than a desire to eradicate difference.
February 23, 2012 at 6:40 pm
The discussion of Pistis at the end of this post seems to have resonance with Negri’s development of the concept of love he writes:
“In materialism, love is the ontological power that constructs being. But being is not a given, but a constructed product. From the standpoint of kairos, we have seen in the first part of these lessons how this construction of being occurs when the arrow of time precipitates into the void of the to-come. Further, we have also seen that love has the effect of making the relation between the eternal and the to-come immeasurable.”
February 23, 2012 at 9:36 pm
Nice. The “work” of pistis is (more or less) one half of what I mean by grace. One face of grace is work, the other face is suffering.
February 24, 2012 at 9:21 pm
So for flat ontology where do beings come from (their source and origin). I do not bring myself into existence….Whitehead certainly required a concept of ‘god’ precisely for this – altho I know you think it is a huge weakness in his cosmology.
(Crocco, Palindrome).
February 24, 2012 at 9:26 pm
I really like this a lot. I particularly hear echoes of Badiou and his work on Paul in the traversal of identitarian difference and the work of love.
February 24, 2012 at 10:10 pm
I really enjoy this post, and I’m with you all along, until you reach the idea of “laboring” to “maintain” the existence of the collective. Why should we do this? What is the reason or meaning behind this? What is the result of this maintenance? These are open questions… let me simply flesh out my skepticism here with reference to Jean-Luc.
Nancy never speaks of an “impossible community” so far as I can tell, nor of a labor that would create or maintain a new community. From his standpoint — and all of his work challenges us to rethink “collectivity” in this sense — there is WE before there is I. Existence is “co-” (and I don’t think Meillassoux’s argument is very legitimate here, since this “co-” isn’t all that far from the immanence you speak of, and it applies as equally to beings as to “human” beings as to things). We’re talking about an ‘originary withness’ that requires no labor to maintain (even if it isn’t necessarily ‘self-evident’). How do we enter in to this elliptical circle?
There is nothing to be maintained, nothing to be labored for: this is the meaning behind the community’s “inoperativity.” Demos itself is difference, then, in a sense. The inoperative community not only will not be put to work, it cannot be put to work: neither the work of death, nor the work of construction. From this perspective, there is no “work” required for the collective to continue: all beings and things are already together — not just like things. This collective isn’t anything and certainly not a unity.The challenge then is to think togetherness outside of unity, or of tapping in to the sense of a togetherness that is nothing more than disjunctive and disunified — “abandoned” is Nancy’s word. In this sense, the non-related are also always already related, just as the related remain forever unrelated. There is nothing to “do” to reach immanence.
To reroute just a bit: can we think of an outside of immanence? Can we think of an immanence “turned inside out”? That is, can we think of a “unity” in immanence that is “more than one”? Can we think of a “one” that has no interest in unification? A “one” that itself IS the opening-up-of-the-one? Can we live this kind of “one” out…. as OURselves?
February 24, 2012 at 11:02 pm
I hope that it’s clear that I meant: can we think of an outside of immanence that does not transcend immanence? I ask this because, more than any other question, this is the question that Nancy asks us.
February 25, 2012 at 12:38 am
Paul,
Things come from other things, of course. There wasn’t a time where there was nothing and them something.
February 25, 2012 at 1:51 pm
might be interesting to read this back into Dewey’s A Common Faith
February 25, 2012 at 9:44 pm
[...] may well come from other things (Levi, here), but they don’t just pop into existence either. Rather, things come from processes in which, [...]
February 25, 2012 at 10:38 pm
Yes, I guess things do come from other things, but surely not all the way down – this will lead to an infinite regress as dear Heidegger noted somewhere. At some point there is something that does not ‘ex-sist’, or is non-entitative; it is, but does not exist, that gives rise to things.
Funnily, Stengers has an essay ‘Turtles all the way down’ in Power and Invention: situating science.
February 26, 2012 at 4:01 pm
I’m reminded of Latour’s injunction against “the sociology of the social,” where the social is treated as some mysterious substance that exerts causal force on groups of people.
But I’m curious about a simpler example. Consider a molecule of water. Each of the atoms in it—two hydrogen and one oxygen—is capable of independent existence. That seems to be your disjunctive logic. A volume of gas containing two hydrogen atoms for each oxygen atom is not going to have any water in it; all the atoms exist independently. But, once a reaction has been triggered so that two hydrogen atoms bond with each oxygen atom, now we’ve got water. And the three atoms thus conjoined must be so in order for the water to exist. Now we have conjunction. And it’s pretty stable. Unless something is supplied from outside the three atoms will be bound together forever.
But that doesn’t quite fit the logic you’ve laid out. Or does it?
February 26, 2012 at 6:22 pm
Paul:
I think object-oriented thought inevitably leads to the infinite regress: everything is composite, everything has reasons for being as they are. Why is this impossible? It’s surely better than positing a final necessary entity (I think Levi and Graham side with Meillassoux at this moment). This is in keeping with Levi’s plane of immanence, too.
What reason do we have for imagining some special, ultimate and unconditioned turtle?
To quote Graham, “the being of beings is always a being.” Or, there is no ground of being that isn’t itself just another being.
February 27, 2012 at 2:38 am
Joseph,
Yes, it seems that OOO/P, onticology, etc., does inevitably lead to an infinite regress. But in what way is it ‘better’. Whitehead found the concept of God necessary – and I’m sure he thought he had good reasons. It was a philosophical necessity for him. That which actualizes entities but which itself is not one.
OOO is not logically ‘better’. In what way do you use the term ‘better’.
You are right imho about 000′s regress.
February 27, 2012 at 4:24 pm
What’s wrong with an infinite regress? It’s implicit in any conception of god anyway since it just puts the idea of infinite regress in a box and calls it god, ground of being etc.
February 27, 2012 at 5:40 pm
If everything comes from something, then where does nothing come from?
Not everything is a “thing”!
OOO will remain trapped in the coordinates of systems (logical, societal, or objectal) as they always are, until it realizes the productive potential of a thinking of the presence of nothing. Until then, it will remain uninspired. And its texts will continue to be compilations or mash-ups of other theorists, drawing the most stringy and simple elements from them while disregarding all the rest, which it will continue to mix with its dual polemic against “language” and “human beings.” Something is shockingly absent, and I wish I could account for this willful blind-spot to anything that escapes the system(s) of objects. All I know is that a pure immanentism gives no room to breathe. It has no idea what it means to be nothing.
February 27, 2012 at 7:24 pm
Fragile,
I agree, “nothing”– without the definite article in front of it –is not a thing. That means that I’m obligated to give an account of how nothing can come into the universe or being. Where theistic and deistic theology presents us with the question of how something can come from nothing, onticology’s a-theology presents us with the question of how nothing can come from something. Here it must be recalled that my thesis is not that objects are the only things that exist. In addition to objects there are properties, relations, events, and so on. My thesis is that nothing is a product of objects capable of memory (certain organisms, social systems, and increasingly a variety of computer technologies). Because memory persists in these systems or entities they are able to have an experience of nothings. A nothing is a local manifestation produced as a result of a play between a past that persists and the present in a cognitive and perceptual apparatus. You might recall that I wrote on issues pertaining to this in my post entitled A Brief Remark on Memory. An interesting feature of systems capable of memory and therefore the experience of nothing is that, as Luhmann observes, remaining unchanged can become a difference generative of change in these systems.
February 27, 2012 at 8:26 pm
I’m sure many have seen this review of Stengers Whitehead by Latour.
http://www.google.co.nz/search?q=bruno+latour+philosophical+invention+whitehead&sourceid=ie7&rls=com.microsoft:en-nz:IE-SearchBox&ie=&oe=&safe=vss&redir_esc=&ei=y-RLT5CFCYrAiQed4JGkDg
“I think it is with Whitehead’s God that Stengers’s book reveals its ultimate
power. Commentators have often tried either to drag Whitehead in theology seminars—forgetting that his God is there to solve very precisely a technical problem of philosophy, not of belief—or to get rid of this embarrassing appendix altogether.
Stengers does not hesitate to go all the way in the direction of Whitehead’s argument: if
nature can’t be seen as bifurcated, if actual occasions are the stuff out of which the world
is made, if “negative prehensions” are the only way actual occasions have to envisage
the world, to apprehend it, if eternal objects are there as guardians against the shift back
to substance and foundations, then a God-function is implied in this philosophy.
But, of course, everything now turns around the word implied, or implicated.
Taken superficially, it shifts the concept of God into one of a king who sits on a throne
or some great plant ensconced in a sort of flower pot, holding this position in order to
close a book of metaphysics—the equivalent in philosophy of the Queen of England in
politics. Or else, taken as a belief, God gives some philosophical luster to parts of the
creed of some church, becoming what you confide in when you have lost confidence in
the world and especially in science. Without disregarding those possibilities, Whitehead
means something else altogether. Implied is not only a logical function—who is less a
logician than the Whitehead of the famous team “Russell and Whitehead”?—but a
thoroughly ontological involvement into the world. God is the feeling for positive,
instead of negative, prehensions. After years (or should I say centuries?) of associating
God with negativity—think, for instance, of Hegel—it will take some time to see his role
as consisting of a positivity, but that would be a welcome change! “Divine experience is,
in that sense, conscious but also incomplete. God does not envisage what could be. His
existence does not precede nor predict future actualisations. His envisagement comes
from the thirst for some novelty that this thirst is going to induce but which, by
definition, will go beyond it” (525).
In a way, it is not surprising that theology has found Whitehead so congenial,
since innovations in theology are few and far between. But Stengers redresses the usual
imbalance and places Whitehead’s invention of a God implicated squarely inside the
world—and unable to “explicate” it, nor to “extricate” himself out of it—as the most
daring but also the most indispensable consequence of his early refusal to let nature
bifurcate. No more than you can choose in nature to eliminate either primary or
secondary qualities can you choose, in Whitehead, between his epistemology and his
theology. And, of course, it would be impossible to say that the modernist philosophy
has “no need for God,” as philosophers are so proud of saying and say frequently. Their
crossed-out God—to use my term—is always there but only to fill gaps in their
reasoning. By taking Whitehead’s God as seriously as Whitehead’s epistemology,
Stengers is leading us in the first systematic attempt at finding a metaphysical alternative
to modernism. The reason why her attempts are so beautifully moving is that
Whitehead has a gift of the most extraordinary rarity: he is not a creature of the culture
of critique. “He knows no critique,” as one could say of a saint “she knows no sin.”
What does it mean to “speak Whiteheadian”? Amusingly, Stengers’s book begins
with some
February 27, 2012 at 8:57 pm
Paul,
Yes. While I don’t embrace Whitehead’s God, it’s important to note that he is not the origin or creator like God in traditional theism or deism. Whitehead’s God is one actual occasion among others amd does not design or create the universe. He doesn’t enjoy sovereignty over all other actual occasions but rather ranks and orders eternal objects or potentialities. Shaviro nice describes Whitehead’s God as the body without organs in his book Without Criteria.
February 27, 2012 at 10:07 pm
Paul:
It’s “better” because it makes ontological sense—it’s consistent. Why would a God be allowed a power or position that nothing else does? There’s no empirical evidence of such an entity, and it would be an ontological exception otherwise.
Fragile:
Yes, that’s right, there is no room to breathe in OOO, because there is no transcendence, be it a transcendence of vision or a transcendence of nothingness. Nothing enjoys such an exception, or, there is no such exception. Either you are something, in which case you have a certain level of particularity, but not overdetermined in your relations to make transformation into something else impossible (in fact your exo-relations are thoroughly underdetermined), or you simply don’t exist. Either you are an object, or you are an object transforming into a new object, or you are an object being undermined by your own parts into death. What escapes the system of objects is just going to be another systematic object. Also, there is no polemic against language or human beings, merely a polemic against correlationism. OOO has no problem with language or humans whatsoever. They are merely two things among the many citizens of the world.
February 28, 2012 at 12:36 am
Larval,
So helpful. I can work through all of that. Thank you for the condensation.
Tim.
February 28, 2012 at 1:08 am
I think what’s so hard for me is this.
There’s no trusting the connection between words and my thought/life. When you guys use and deny the word “transcendence,” this implies that the meaning or operative function of this word has been figured out. It’s then mobilized and opposed to make as clear a possible a position that is endowed with a meaning through this mobilization. The specific word at issue, however, doesn’t really matter. For me it is a question of the use of language in general, ones attitude toward it. As objects, even, the words cannot maintain this meaning we try to endow them with, the function we assign to them. Call me crazy, but this poses a huge set of problems for the presentation of thought.
I concede that this is an obstacle we ceaseless gloss over in everyday life. All I can do is assure you is that “nothing” means nothing, “nothing” is nothing. It’s not just an objective operator, thing, idea, nothing, whose meaning is given in the theory or in the common usage of language. It is what is real right here (so to speak!!). But there is a disconnect between this offering of meaning, the use of language, and thought. Between the words and us.
I wish I could go into more depth, but this is what I have for now.
February 28, 2012 at 1:15 am
I’m stressing something that applies beyond OOO, I realize that, but I don’t think I could have realized that without it, or the challenge that *your mobilization of terms poses to me. It sets up a whole universe. It requires everything of me. I don’t find my own mobilization of terms to be any different functionally, or even according to meaning. All I recognize is a different vis-a-vis the primary difficulty of articulation. Or rather: what is this vibrating tension or difference between the system and collapse? (I imagine there are some answer OOO has for me, which is truly fascinating to me.) What is vibrating between the force and the signification, the madness and the reason, the genesis and the structure, the expenditure in thought and the economy set up in language — where the question is ultimately between a restricted economy (Hegelian) or a general economy (à la Bataille)?
February 28, 2012 at 1:32 am
The idea that nothing is the result of a process, or of a memory, or even a product, an experience of any sort, is also worrying to me. “Only what is comic is perfect” (Laura Riding).
February 28, 2012 at 1:59 am
Fragilekeys,
I’m in the middle of cooking so I can only respond partially, inadequately, and selectively but you write:
My response would be not that you are wrong or in error, but to ask why you think this phenomenon is unique to the relationship between words and thought, words and world? My thesis is that the world is composed entirely of objects (even subjects are objects) and that objects, when they relate, always distort each other. What you describe of the way in which there’s a disconnect between word and thought– I think here of Saussure’s two streams, one of thought, the other of sound –would, under this reading, be no different than the way in which two people relate to one another or the way a spotted owl relates to the branch of a tree, and so on (cf Objects, Machines, and Engines). It’s not that it’s wrong to say what you’re saying or that I disagree, but that the general ontological principle of “dis-connection” and transformation is not general enough.
On the specific issue of immanence and transcendence, the fault is partially my own (but how can I be blamed given that just as no object can be mastered, and just as language is an object among others, language cannot be mastered?). I use “transcendence” and “immanence” in a very specific way: “Transcendence”, for me, refers to something that stands outside and above being, conditioning beings without itself being conditioned; while “immanence” refers to what is within being and relations among beings. Under this gloss, examples of transcendence would be God and Platonic forms, while examples of immanence would be the way in which the moon and the earth reciprocally interact with one another without one or the other mastering the other or determining the other.
With Descartes and later phenomenology, immanence and transcendence began to take on a different signification. Immanence came to be understood as what is present to mind (my thought, for example), while transcendence came to signify what is outside thought (the object thought about). Under these significations, my experience and thoughts about you would be immanent to my mind, while you would be transcendent to mind. This is not the signification I have in mind when I speak of immanence and transcendence. For me it’s perfectly fine to suggest that there’s something immanent to mind about itself and that there are other things that are transcendent to mind, so long as we also say that there’s something of each object that is immanent to itself and that when objects relate to other objects these objects are transcendent to that object (one meaning of withdrawal or non-relationality). In other words, I have no problem with using the terms in these ways so long as we also maintain that there’s nothing unique about humans with respect to this immanence/transcendence couplet.
March 1, 2012 at 1:06 pm
I’m perfectly willing to agree with you that the disconnect between words and thoughts is “kind of the same” as the disconnect between any thing and any other thing. You go further and say it’s “no different,” which I disagree with. The way I relate to my notebooks has very little in common with how my lamp relates with the lampshade. I don’t see how a theory would ever lead me to see those as functionally, tangibly, or ontologically the same. To do so amounts to a reduction that seems pointless, if not absurd.
In my eyes, you are a systematizer, you are a “Hegelian” in a kind of way: you set up a restricted economy of vocabulary words which admit of little variance. There’s no outside, no flexibility, and everything takes charge through the opposition of terms. As a reader, I’m not participating, but receiving, and I can hardly have a dialog with you without adopting your terminology to some extent. This terminology and its logic is a vortex that, with the ever-ready defense of withdrawn objects and the denial of epistemological claims, simply swallows everything in terminological closure. Meaning is distributed to a word qua intention, and then that meaning is mobilized qua intention for the purposes of being theoretically sound.Then you have to labor incessantly to keep upholding these meanings, so as to keep the system from totally disintegrating (or from constantly being misunderstood). I’m just concerned that this is a losing battle (but also that it’s possible for this disintegration to be embraced, inscribed, etc.). Does this make any sense to you? Is this simply not an issue for you?
These are very violent tidal waves that the systematizer fights, an unreality in language, that is not just one “inaccessible dimension” among all others in my view. Language is the separation from reality, not a mirror for it. You’re using language as an instrument, as a tool, treating it as fully accessible, transparent, capable of perfect communication, etc. You’re treating “language” as something you can isolate, as an “object” having to do with “social systems.” Once you isolate it, its difficulties can be mitigated, its complexities and confusions annulled. Then words can be given meanings, language can be used to articulate the system. But then the winds blow and the sands shift, because language is not quite like that. And all of a sudden, the castle is gone. This happens in an instant, doesn’t it?
I know that from day one we have quarreled over this issue in language, but it seems insurmountable. Words don’t have or retain meanings, and its a propagandist’s game to try and get meaning to “stick.”
March 1, 2012 at 1:17 pm
To be clear, I’m not in any way trying to call into question what you do. I find your effort colossal and respectable in every sense. I just mean to offer a counterpoint from my perspective. Before we are anything, I think, we are both writers, so I know that the anxieties I’ve articulated are not “news” to you, just as I am constantly battling with terms, their dualities and oppositions, getting meaning to “stick,” etc., although in different ways. Perhaps the concerns I’ve raised simply have to be ignored to make any progress in the kind of writing you do– but I’m still curious, since (for me) everything revolves around these shifting sands, these sands are my material. There is no “memory” in what I do (no conscious memory, at least), no accumulation, no meaning, no system, no progress. Everything has to start over, every time. You can imagine how difficult it is for me to comprehend how a different view of language is even possible.
Cheers, and all the best,
Tim.
March 1, 2012 at 4:38 pm
Fragilekeys,
I’m hesitant to respond to your remarks at all as I find them deeply uncharitable. I get by with language as best I can and am only able to work with the language that I have. Moreover, I just don’t feel that what you say is accurate. Even the most cursory glance at my blog reveals that I’m perpetually inhabiting the language of other thinkers, exploring their ways of articulating the world, and that I strive to see what it’s like to encounter the world through their lenses. This is true of my published work as well. As I remark in the introduction to The Democracy of Objects, I conceive my relation to philosophy and theory in terms of bricolage.
Finally, I think you get things exactly backwards in your description of my relationship to language, suggesting that you have not attended closely to the nature of my claims. You write:
This is simply an amazing thing for someone who purports to have read anything I’ve written to claim about my thought and my views on language. The core this of onticology and object-oriented ontology more broadly is that all relations between entities are indirect. This is what it means to say that they are withdrawn. Because all relations between entities are indirect, no entity can perfectly grasp another entity. Every entity relates to other entities through sieves or filters that distort those other entities. This necessarily entails that it is impossible for language to mirror reality, for it to be fully accessible, transparent, or capable of perfect communication. The only point is that this phenomenon is not a unique property of language, but is a ubiquitous ontological feature of relations between all entities. All relations between entities are indirect, and all relations to other things distort the other things to which they relate. This is true of language, this is true of a dogs relation to a fire hydrant, this is true of a mantis shrimp’s relation to a coral reef, this is true of cotton’s relationship to fire, and yes, it is true of a lamps relation to a lampshade.
With respect to language, you might recall that I’m a Lacanian that has also practiced as a psychoanalyst. Nothing in my thought has come to reject Lacan’s claims about language: language is thick, dense, opaque, and polysemous, such that it is incapable of mirroring reality, such that it is not transparent, and such that meaning cannot be fixed. The best we can do is, to use Harman’s vocabulary, allude to the real. And, as Lacan says, “all communication is miscommunication.” Ironically you seem to here be complaining that I pointed out a miscommunication between us regarding how we were respectively using the terms immanence and transcendence and are now taking me to the woodshed for striving to clarify what I have in mind when I use the term. Apparently your idea of “dialogue” and “conversation” consists in me quivering in a corner and shaking silently while you lecture me about the features of language that I’ve already written extensively about and of which I’m well aware, all the while as you completely invert the nature of what I’m claiming. This way of speaking to others is endemic, I think, to the linguistic idealists of the world. They claim to be combating mastery and the will to power, but in reality they seek total mastery by forbidding all speech and risk altogether in others. To make a claim, any claim they say, is to somehow be guilty of seeking to master in control, rather than to subject oneself to risk and failure. In forbidding claims and speech in others they reveal their desire to master others or their will to solipsism.
At any rate, to repeat, my only point is that what you say is not unique to how language relates to world and thought, but is true of how everything relates to other things. If I’m not particularly perturbed or disturbed by what you say, it’s because it’s old news to me and because I hold that language is but one example of generalized phenomena.
All of these types of relations differ amongst themselves, but ontologically share the same feature of being indirect and of distorting that to which they relate. As Latour says of relations, “all translations are transformations.” When something relates to something else it translates that thing. Translation always changes that which it translates, making it something else, thereby transforming it. As a consequence, no translation can be true to the original that it translates. The point is that this is true not simply of texts translating texts, but of any entity relating to another entity. It’s strange that you would berate me for not recognizing this when it is something that I repeat ceaselessly and when it is the core hypothesis of my ontology.
March 1, 2012 at 11:52 pm
I’m afraid you’re reading a bit more maliciousness into my words than is there. I’m challenged by a difference in perspective regarding language which seems to be dismissable for you. I’m not trying to make anyone quiver in the corner (that would be me, if anyone). I’m not forbidding speech to anyone. If anything, I’m on the look out for more risks. To me this means not distributing meaning qua intention as you see fit (the point I’ve raised multiple times, while each time, you focus on one small piece of what I’ve said), not raising up an edifice of terms.
Alas, your theory swallows me up, along with my voice. All I am is an objection now.
In the end, I care much less about hypotheses and *claims* than I do about the usage of language as I see it in practice. I confess my impotence to make whatever my claims are (if I actually have them). From here on, I’ll try to leave these worries out of the conversation.
Sorry for the inconvenience!
March 2, 2012 at 12:01 am
I think what’s so disheartening is that I feel like I’m always talking to a theory. I don’t get a human voice in response, but some kind of machine that tells me about objects. I suppose I shouldn’t be expecting any kind of discourse but the discourse of the theory then. As if I expected too much…. humanity. I admit, you don’t owe me that.
March 2, 2012 at 12:15 am
fragilekeys:
I’ve read most of your posts on your blog, and they are interesting, but I certainly think you *are* making hypotheses and claims all the time. What’s the problem with that? I feel like Zizek is right on this point: you don’t need all of these explicit caveats and hesitations, because they are already shared by everyone. All claims are already tentative and not absolute.
If the problem was really just about what you say, that you just want to focus on the usage of language in practice, then I don’t think you would make the points you do. I don’t think OOO would perturb you as it does. I think it’s much deeper, much more ontological, than that. Who is stopping you from talking about language? Not OOO. Not at all.
March 2, 2012 at 1:03 am
Wow, Fragilekeys. The door is right over there. I won’t be publishing further comments from you given these despicable remarks.
March 2, 2012 at 1:05 am
You ask me questions specifically about my positions and I respond clarifying those positions and then you neat me up about it. Dude, you have issues.
March 2, 2012 at 1:09 am
And just just one further point about language, I think it take a pretty blind, myopic, economically privileged asshole to want to sit around masturbating about linguistic opacity and play at this historical moment. We have an economy that’s collapsing all over the world, people starving and out of work, and a climate that is collapsing. You want to sit around talking words like some spiffy 80s Reaganite where everything is signs and images, while the world collapses. Maybe we need just a little less of that myopic, clueless crap right now and should start attending to things like energy, water resources, corn, amd meat for a time, no?
March 2, 2012 at 1:17 am
And finally, as Joseph points out, no one’s stopping you from talking about language. I’ve repeated, until I’m blue in the face, that I agree with you and how I situate those points in my own work. Apparently for you it wasn’t enough that I explicitly, over a number of posts, expressed agreement with your points about language. I just refuse to treat language as a privileged, unique or centrally important site of engagement for the reasons I cited a moment ago: I think it’s decadent and myopic when the planet is crashing down around our ears. The fact that you continue to object and throw this little temper tantrum about how I’m somehow so rude and inhuman for responding to your theoretical observations and remarks in a theoretical way despite the fact that I agreed with you, indicates that for you there’s something deeper going on here that’s not just about properties of language, but a desire to privilege language. Well I’ll have none of that as the world’s crashing down. The problem with the postmodern, semiotic idealists is that they’re bourgeois, privileged twerps that think the world is woven of the signifier and that are incapable of noticing things like fish dying, air being polluted, people starving to death, etc. When they do deign to notice they give the utterly lame response that “the signifier did it” and that “the signifier will fix it”, as if the signifier can make plants grow in drought ravaged land. I’m sorry for being so inhuman in worrying about life, people, jobs and whatnot, and especially for responding in a theoretical way to questions posed, ahem to my theoretical positions.